Google Play Music

Google Play Music finally launched in Canada today. I’m kind of happy about this, because it means sales and cheap music. Their launch promotion is a bunch of current hit and past albums for $1.49. For that price, I don’t mind buying albums that I don’t really know; and picked up Arcade Fire’s Reflektor and Tegan & Sara’s Heartthrob on a whim. Hopefully there will be more sales, credits or promotions because that would be a good way for me to continue building my music collection since I don’t spend much time on it anymore.

I guess Google Play Music is like Amazon Cloud Player, which I have had access to for a long time. A quick play around Google Play (heh) and I think I would use it more than I would Amazon’s offering. One reason is device integration (I don’t have Amazon phones/tablets) but I think it’s more because the design is nicer than Amazon’s utilitarian approach. Being able to upload 20,000 songs (instead of Amazon’s 250) is really useful too, because I checked my iTunes and I have less than 5000 songs there. So I can upload my entire collection and store it in the cloud. For free!